Blogs

Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development

Scott is a Senior Consulting Partner of Scott W. Ambler and Associates, working with organizations around the world to help them to improve their software processes. He provides training, coaching, and mentoring in disciplined agile and lean strategies at both the project and organizational level. He is the founder of the Agile Modeling (AM), Agile Data (AD), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), and Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) methodologies. Scott is the (co-)author of 19 books, including Disciplined Agile Delivery, Refactoring Databases, Agile Modeling, Agile Database Techniques, The Object Primer 3rd Edition, and The Enterprise Unified Process. Scott is a senior contributing editor with Dr. Dobb's Journal and his company home page is ScottWAmbler.com

Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development

I recently wrote an "e-book" for Internet Evolution overviewing agile software development at scale. The goal of the Agility at Scale: Become as Agile as You Can Be ebook is to get people thinking outside of the box a bit when it comes to agile development strategies and see that they really are ready for primetime.

The Scrum community has adopted a different set of terms than the other agile methodologies. This is done on purpose to help people realize that Agile approaches are different than traditional approaches, which can help in their adoption, but it can also hinder people's understanding because some of the terminology is not only non-standard it really doesn't make much sense. Because of this I'm often asked by people that I'm coaching to convert back and forth between terms, and recently wrote a detailed article on the subject. The following summarizes the mapping:

Daily Scrum Meeting ==> Daily Stand-up Meeting

Product Backlog ==> Work Item List

Scrum Master ==> Team Lead or Team Coach

Sprint ==> Iteration or Time Box

For more details read my article Translating Scrum Terminology which includes explanations of a wider range of Scrum terms and discussions of why some of them really are questionable.